How are you calculating the cost per Case/Incident?

Matt Meyerhoff

We are looking to find the best practice or industry supported way to calculate cost per case.

While taking an engineers compensation (Salary, Benefits) and dividing by the cases taken is an individual way to see how that engineers compensation relates to case closures, what other things should go into this calculation?

When do you include direct managers, directors or other supporting job roles?

I look forward to gathering data from our peers to ensure we follow what the best in the industry are doing.

Matt Bowling

@Matt Meyerhoff - we take a very high-level approach here where Cost Per Case = (sum of employee costs) * (total tickets closed) for a given period, typically a year.

Within the employee costs, I include front-line staff, their managers, and myself (as the manager of managers). While a simplistic calculation, it gives us an easy-to-understand value that we can use to educate or capture the eyeballs of impacted departments across the business. So, it may not be industry standard or best-practice but it is whats working for us.

Waqas Mahmood

Another aspect you should think of is support tickets that result in engineering engagement, order fulfilment, or if you engage other departments. How much time do they spend on bug fixing or answering support questions etc?

If the management's sole purpose is to manage the support team and processes then they should be included in the cost or at least the percentage of time spent on managing support.

From the incident cost; think of the knowledgebase articles or other resources created by support that helps you avoid a support ticket i.e. support deflection. How many support tickets do you avoid by posting knowledgebase articles via the customer community etc. This cost saved should be discounted if support helped build the body of the knowledge.